Art Invades Life or Vice Verse

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This morning while having a meeting with my team at Philz Coffee, we came across a story from Washington Post released 20 October 2001. It was like this –

You be the judge: a pile of empty beer bottles, dirty ashtrays, coffee cups and candy wrappers. It’s crud, but is it art?

Cleaner Emmanuel Asare didn’t think so when he arrived at London’s Eyestorm Gallery Wednesday morning, so he threw the lot into the trash. It turns out the “installation” had been created by British artist Damien Hirst after the launch party for his Painting by Numbers show the night before.

“I didn’t think for a second that it was a work of art. It didn’t look much like art to me,” Asare told the Sun newspaper.

The 35-year-old Hirst said the mistake was “fantastic very funny.” When gallery workers discovered the work had been trashed, they hastily recovered the piece and reconstructed it from photographs.

There never used to be any question about the difference between art and life. No matter how closely it resembled its subject matter from the real world, art was clearly separated from that subject until 20th-century artists began to challenge even this most basic distinction.

This phenomenon began with the works of Pablo Picasso specifically, his Cubist collages from 1912-13. Numerous scholars have written eloquently about the history and significance of Cubism. Suffice it to say here that Cubism-invented by Picasso and Georges Braque around 1908 really was as important a development in the history of Western art as everyone says it was. Cubist paintings retain some tie to observed reality since are usually based on an identifiable they subject, such as a figure holding a musical instrument or a still life. Yet it is often difficult to identify the subject matter in these works because the Cubists distorted forms to the point where they became unrecognizable.

Perhaps this is the beginning of collage art.

By Pablo Picasso, Guitar and Wine Glass, 1912

Andy Hanson is the Chief Editor of Artify Your Walls by PanelWallArt.com

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